OpenOffice.org V3.0 Sets Download Record, 80% Windows

thefickler writes "The newest version of OpenOffice, version 3.0, has set a download record in its first week of availability. Most surprising is the fact that over 80% of downloads were from Windows users. As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."

Comments

Package Managers?

[QBasicer]

The question here is do the download numbers also reflect copies downloaded with package managers such in Linux distros such as Gentoo and Ubuntu, or does it only count people that only actually go to the webpage to download? The way Windows users and Linux users tend to get software these days tends to be a little different, where windows users expect going to the website, downloading, and using an something like Install Shield to install.

Re:Package Managers?

[RiotingPacifist]

while gentoo may have an openoffice 'overlay'(not a gentoo user so that may be the wrong term) most ubuntu users will have to download the deb manually (either from here or a third party repo (cant think of any for ubuntu) or wait for 9.04

oh and from TFA

Only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded, leading John McCreesh, head of marketing for OpenOffice.org, to suggest a massive undercount. McCreesh said 90% of Linux users traditionally receive OpenOffice.org updates straight from their Linux distribution's vendor, which would explain the relatively low Linux count.

but that would still give windows >66% (assuming os x makes up 0%, which is possible due to neo office)

Re:Package Managers?

[bonch]

Your question is answered in the link, which says the numbers are skewed. Thus, this announcement is a bit of misleading marketing on the part of OpenOffice.

Re:Package Managers?

[EvilRyry]

Semi-offical PPA for intrepid: https://launchpad.net/~openoffice-pkgs/+archive

Re:Package Managers?

[niskel]

It's in Gentoo; I have been using it for a few days...

Re:Package Managers?

[phantomlord]

ebuilds are the packages in gentoo, overlays are unofficial repositories of ebuilds.

That said, the binary ebuild downloads from the gentoo mirrors rather than the official OpenOffice.org web/ftp servers, but the source built version downloads directly from go-oo.org

Re:Package Managers?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's in Gentoo; I have been compiling it for a few days...

There, fixed it for you

Re:Package Managers?

[De Lemming]

(assuming os x makes up 0%, which is possible due to neo office)

Now that OpenOffice has native support for OS X, I switched from NeoOffice to OpenOffice 3. I don't see the need anymore for an extra layer above the original software, and releases which lag behind those of OpenOfiice. I suspect a lot of Mac users are doing the same.

Re:Package Managers?

[jonaskoelker]

McCreesh said 90% of Linux users traditionally receive OpenOffice.org updates straight from their Linux distribution's vendor

but that would still give windows >66% (assuming os x makes up 0%, which is possible due to neo office

Let's do the math. The official site sees (scaled down) 2 linux downloads and 8 windows downloads. For every 1 of these linux downloads, there's 9 downloading from the distro archives instead of the official site.

That gives us 20 linux downloads, 8 windows downloads. Or just above 25%. How did you come up with 66%?

Even if it's just 25%, that's a fair slice; this means that the plan of moving people over to open-source apps first and moving the OS out under them later has not been shown to be infeasible: windows users are moving to the open-source apps.

Only 221,000 downloads by Linux users were recorded

So just shy of 900,000 windows downloads? That's quite good.

I won't say "we're winning!!one!11ty", but some cautious optimism is probably in order.

Re:Package Managers?

[SaDan]

I replaced Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac with OpenOffice 3.0 for Mac.

Frees up a license for someone who would prefer Microsoft Office 2008 at work, and we buy one less copy overall. This may enable us to drop MS Office for Mac entirely, which would solve a lot of headaches.

Re:Package Managers?

[heffeque]

"assuming os x makes up 0%"

You assumed wrong:

Windows 2.450.000
Mac 322.000
Linux 221.000 + non counted downloads.

Re:Package Managers?

[porl]

nonsense. there is no such thing as binary packages for gentoo... it's a myth and you know it. i'll have you stop perpetuating those lies right away if you please.

porl

Re:Package Managers?

[RiotingPacifist]

ill be honest I've been having a bad weekend with maths so i just got it completely wrong.

Re:Package Managers?

[Erikderzweite]

$ genlop -t openoffice
Sat Oct 25 17:09:27 2008 >>> app-office/openoffice-3.0.0
              merge time: 1 hour, 22 minutes and 57 seconds.

$ cat /proc/cpuinfo | grep "model name"
model name : Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T7250 @ 2.00GHz

Re:Package Managers?

[Erikderzweite]

I would recommend Gentoo with getdelta on dialup. Saves a lot of traffic.

Re:Package Managers?

[sgbett]

In fact, one of the great things about 'community' is that its not just gimmick.

Depending on your propensity for tinfoil headwear, I would be happy to mail you a copy.

Re:Package Managers?

[Rich0]

Uh, the gentoo ebuilds almost always download from gentoo mirrors. The only common exceptions are:

1. Non-free software with restrictions on distribution (java used to fall into this category).
2. Files downloaded REALLY soon after the ebuild is made. The gentoo mirrors are updated automatically but it can take a few hours before they all notice the new package in the portage tree. So, if you fetch the files quickly enough you might beat the mirrors, in which case the ebuild will eventually fall back to the upstream repository.

Go ahead and try fetching the openoffice source now - you'll find that it uses your gentoo mirrors. The gentoo mirroring system is fairly impressive - as soon as an ebuild goes into the tree the mirrors start noticing and begin retrieving the distribution files. When an ebuild leaves the tree the mirrors notice and purge the distribution files (probably after some delay). The gentoo mirrors also handle files that are manually pushed out.

Re:Package Managers?

[that this is not und]

Your rant kind of reminds me of the way Democrats froth when a pundit decloaks as a conservative by referring to the Democratic Party as the 'Democrat Party.'

Yeah, he hates Macs. How mean of him.

Re:Package Managers?

[dwater]

hrm...2hrs for a 2 yo laptop

so, I guess 1hr for a 1 yo laptop

I see a pattern :)

If I buy a brand new laptop, it'll be compiled instantly, right?

80%

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is 80% surprising? The article makes it sound like that's high, but Windows has more than 80% of the desktop market, so it's still a lower percentage.

Re:80%

[szundi]

It's not surprising when you realize that a lot of linux users will simply wait for the next release that has az ooo3 prepackaged. (me too) These users won't generate more than 1 download that the package maintainer will execute :)

Re:80%

[AliasMarlowe]

I doubt OOo3 was downloaded by the majority of Windows users.

And I doubt that it was downloaded by the majority of Linux users also.

Most Linux users prefer to upgrade software using the channels for their distrobution. None of my 3 systems have been upgraded to OOo3 yet, but they will be, as soon as it shows up in the repos.

Re:80%

[bcrowell]

Why is 80% surprising? The article makes it sound like that's high, but Windows has more than 80% of the desktop market, so it's still a lower percentage.

In fact, I think 80% is surprisingly low.

First off, we really shouldn't count Macs as part of the equation. I haven't checked recently, but for a long time, OOo's support for MacOS X lagged way, way behind. It was essentially unusable.

So of OOo's potential audience, I would guess 99% would be Windows users, 1% Linux users. I would therefore expect 99% of OOo downloads to be the Windows version. Not only that, but a lot of Linux users probably aren't going to download it from the OOo web site, they're going to get it when it becomes the default through their distro's packaging infrastructure, and therefore they presumably won't be counted in this statistic. Let's guess (pulling numbers out of my rear end, I admit) that 90% of Linux desktop users won't downloaad directly, and will get it via their distro. So based on these factors, I would have expected the percentages to be more like 99.9% Windows and 0.1% Linux, a ratio of 1000 to 1.

It's actually pretty darn depressing that the Windows figure is as low as 80%. That's a 4:1 ratio rather than the 1000:1 ratio I would have expected. That suggests that the Windows market for OOo is hundreds of times smaller than it would be based merely on the market share of the operating systems. Some possible interpretations, none of which are pretty:

1. The Windows users who have never heard of OOo outnumber those who have, by hundreds to one.
2. For every Windows user who's willing and able to switch, there are hundreds of others who can't, because it's impractical for them. (E.g., they don't get to choose what's on their computer at work, or they have too many documents already in Word format that they're afraid would be a huge hassle to convert 100% correctly.)
3. For every Windows user who thinks OOo is better than MS Office, there are hundreds who hold the opposite opinion.

I wouldn't be surprised of #3 captured the essential truth of the situation. OOo is one of the worst pieces of OSS I use. I've searched systematically for something better, and haven't found it. At this point, I feel like OOo was a dead end that had the unfortunate effect of killing off interest in competing OSS office software.

Re:80%

[Niten]

First off, we really shouldn't count Macs as part of the equation. I haven't checked recently, but for a long time, OOo's support for MacOS X lagged way, way behind. It was essentially unusable.

No, we have to count Macs. One of the big bullet points on the OpenOffice 3 release notes was its new native Aqua support on OS X.

Re:80%

[bcrowell]

It's been years and years now that Mac users haven't had a decent version of OOo to catch their interest.

It was called NeoOffice, a third-party project that took the OpenOffice.org code and added some sort of Java layer to allow it to run natively in Aqua.

That's why I added the qualifier "decent." When I tried it, NeoOffice was simply horrible.

Re:80%

[hawaiian717]

I've used NeoOffice for several months, and didn't notice it being significantly different than OO.o on Fedora.

Re:80%

[RudeIota]

For every Windows user who's willing and able to switch, there are hundreds of others who can't, because it's impractical for them.

For many 'professional' users, the lack of an Outlook-ish program is probably a huge deterrent. :(

Re:80%

[blackest_k]

Or it could be that not everyone who uses a PC knows the release date of the next version of Open Office and is waiting to grab it at the earliest opportunity

besides which docx support as of a couple of weeks ago still was um rough to say the least. It's far more likely that people will upgrade over a period of months.

Re:80%

[Brain Damaged Bogan]

80% isn't that low when you consider that the vast majority of linux users will use OOo because there isn't another great altertnative.
Now, I'm not saying that MS Office is great, but the VAST majority of windows users are just going to use MS Office because they either aren't aware of OOo, don't care about OOo or have tried it and not liked it.
Your assumption that 99% of the downloads should be windows because 99% of the market use windows is therefore a bad assumption because on one platform OOo has almost no competition, while on the other it only has almost insignificant penetration because of a competing product endorsed by the OS vendor.

Re:80%

[MBGMorden]

What is the name of the actual windowing system?

The name of the toolkit (which is really what they need to support to get it native looking/behaving) is Cocoa (for most apps - Carbon is a secondary native toolkit that can be used by developers more familiar with Mac development methods prior to the release of OS X).

Re:80%

[that this is not und]

There are plenty of Windows users that have an old version of Office and see no point in tossing it.

That is the paradox of Linux on the desktop.

People who struggle with OpenOffice or any of the other Free Software/Open Source applications forget how refined things are in the commercial software world. I can remember a few years back being jubilant that I finally had a Linux desktop setup all working smoothly to do reasonable WYSIWYG text and graphics editing. I even had a decent vector-based drawing package integrated in. But after awhile I realized 'hey, this is about as good as Office 4.3 was on Windows 3.11 with Micrografx Designer' (substitute Corel Draw if you prefer.)

Re:80%

[TheRaven64]

Aqua is an umbrella term for a set of look and behaviours. An Aqua app looks and behaves in a certain way. It interacts correctly with the services system, with the pasteboards and so on. It follows the platform human interface guidelines. Quartz is the windowing / drawing system, often referred to as 'Display PDF' since it was inspired by both the PDF drawing model and by NeXT's Display PostScript.

In *NIX terms, it's the difference between being a native X11 app and being a KDE app (for example). A native X11 app will run next to your KDE apps and will have some integration, but it won't look or behave like the other apps you use. It won't have the same menu layout, or the same shortcuts. Copying and pasting or dragging and dropping anything other than plain text may not work. It might see the same fonts you use, if it uses FontConfig, but it might also see a completely different set, or a different view of the same set (e.g. different substitutions).

This is something you notice a lot on OS X, where there are a huge number of keyboard shortcuts that are the same in every single application. When one application uses different ones, it's jarring to use. Sure, now it uses the native APIs for drawing lines, but that's not really a user-visible benefit (although it's slightly faster now it doesn't go through the X11 to Quartz mapping). It now has a theme that looks a bit like Aqua, but that doesn't help because it leads you to expect it to behave like Aqua, when it doesn't.

Even simple things like buttons in dialog boxes are often wrong. On OS X, in left-to-right reading order countries, the button for proceed is on the right and the button for back is on the left. Every button has a verb on it, not 'yes' or 'no'.

Price a determinating factor?

[Anonymous Coward]

People don't want to spend money on something they can get for free? That's amazing! Seriously, I know I'm not working at the only company that is getting ready to dump Microsoft Office. It's pretty sad when you realize that the vast majority of your workers would be happier going from Office 2003 to OpenOffice than going to Office 2007.

Re:Price a determinating factor?

[Potor]

That's EXACTLY why I downloaded OOo 3, and use it at home. I was so pissed off that market dominance made me switch from WP to Word, and that the time I spent learning Word has been wasted, since MS changed almost everything around. My desktop at work still has an older version of Word, but my home machine, a company-supplied laptop, has 2007 installed.

I know I am preached to the converted, but that was the worst marketing decision they could possibly make, imho.

Re:Price a determinating factor?

[jonaskoelker]

retrain users [...] how to support this new application ([...] train support people), then figure out how to deploy this

And none of this happens during the switch from Office 2003 to Office 2007? Poor users.

Yes, I really said "poor users". What do you mean "you're not a real sysadmin"? ;)

Re:Price a determinating factor?

[Whiteox]

Time spent learning should be minimal if you already know how a word processor works

No it's not true. The AC has it wrong. MS Word has developed tools that are much more sophisticated than OO.
I regularly use drawing tools, call outs, line and text boxes, Word Art etc in documentation and it is so much easier to do in MS 2003 than OO (I haven't tried OO3 yet).
That takes skill and training to use effectively and at speed. Even though OO2x has similar tools, it is just different enough in its ability and finesse to be unusable.
I had to use MS2007 to do a particularly difficult and complicated graphic, and even though the ribbon menu was absolutely horrible to use, all the tools of the previous version(s) were there and in some instances, much improved.
For straight WP I love OO2x and I'm very eager to get OO3, but so far there is always a place for MS Office.
I really want OO3+ to have the functionality of MS Word so I can finally get rid of it for my uses and give the license away to some deserving group or individual.

Linux distro packages

[Anonymous Coward]

I would guess that a lot of Linux users will wait for OO.o to show up in their distro packaging system, and not download it directly. For the systems that I actually need to use to get work done, I am *very* reluctant to go outside the packaging system, because the many extra hassles are rarely worth it. If I wanted to have to monitor external web sites and manually do unpgrades on all my apps I'd still be using Windows. (OK, no not really, but you get the point.) I use Ubuntu on the desktop because, for me, it Just Works, with many fewer hassles than Windows.

"Almost Identical"?

[coryking]

Is that like saying a cordless phone and a cell phone is *almost* identical because they both make phone calls?

Or did I just get trolled by the summary?

Re:"Almost Identical"?

[CSMatt]

You have a point. I would conjecture that the dissimilarities of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007 are one of the driving factors in OpenOffice.org's adoption.

Re:"Almost Identical"?

[MightyYar]

It depends on what you are doing. If you just want to make a phone call, then you don't really care if the phone is cordless or cellular - just so it works.

Similarly, unless you are using some particular feature found in MS Office but not in OO.org, then you won't really care which one you use.

If you just want to hammer out a memo or make a crappy-looking presentation, OO.org is just as capable as MS Office.

Re:"Almost Identical"?

[slittle]

Or did I just get trolled by the summary?

"You must be new here."

For the majority of users, OOo is roughly equivalent to Office. The only cases where I've run into trouble are with funky formatting and hardcore formulas/macros, which is pretty much power user territory. Most people either don't do complex operations, or do them by trial and error which works just as well under OOo as Office.

Also I suspect that most people still have/use the copy of Works/Office that came with their computer, which is probably also running Windows XP and is up to seven (7) years old. Their choice is: use the same old software, pay to upgrade (a much higher price than the OEM got it), or download free OOo. It might not be as good, but it's new and shiny and they didn't have to pay for it.

Obsessive compulsive upgrade disorder just bit MS in the arse.

Re:"Almost Identical"?

[gilgongo]

You have a point. I would conjecture that the dissimilarities of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007 are one of the driving factors in OpenOffice.org's adoption.

Really? It seems pretty obvious to me that Sun tried hard to mimic almsot every aspect of MSO's UI and feature set for the simple reason that doing so is probably the only way you are going to ensure Joe Sixpack migrates.

Personally, I was hugely disappointed by OO the first time I used it. Not that it's bad as such, but that it fails to address so many things in MSO that have been crying out for improvement. Thanks to the flatulent Microsoft monopoly that means they don't give a cr*p about quality, MS Word, Excel and (OMFG) PowerPoint remain difficult to use and suffer from poor design almost 20 years after they were first produced.

What are things coming to if we have to beg? ("Are you really listening to your customers' cries for help?" Answer: "Why should we? We're making money in a monopoly! See ya!")

Very few, if any, of the very long-standing usability issues with MSO are addressed in OO. Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that none of the many principles of efficient word precessing laid down years ago by the likes of Jef Raskin or Don Norman look likely ever to see the light of day.

So while using MSO is a teeth-grinding, desk pounding slog though bone-headed "features", I would say that OO is a huge, but perhaps necessary, disappointment.

PS: Coincidentally, my father was wondering why spell check wasn't working in Word today. Every time he tried it, he got a message saying "Cannot find blahblahspell24.dll and somethingdict55.dll." After several hours of fumbling, he found out that this meant MSO didn't have its spelling and grammar tools installed (he was trying to save space when installing). Now, in a application over 20 years old, it takes a special kind of arrogance to let an error condition like that stand without having it say "Please install the spelling and grammar tools."

Re:"Almost Identical"?

[westlake]

You have a point. I would conjecture that the dissimilarities of OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office 2007 are one of the driving factors in OpenOffice.org's adoption.
.

MS Office 2007 has been doing quite well in the real world:

The Microsoft business division, which includes the Office suite of software, grew 20% to $4.95 billion. Microsoft's Profit Rises, But Outlook Is Damped [October 24]

20% growth in one quarter. If the tech sector as a whole is in the ICU with double pneumonia, Microsoft has a case of the sniffles.

Microsoft Office 2007/8 holds 4 of top 25 slots in software sales at Amazon.com.

In the retail market, Microsoft Office is bigger than games.

It is bigger than anything.

"Here's the really interesting statistic," said Chris Swenson, NPD's director of Software Industry Analysis. "Over two-thirds of the dollar volume growth in the U.S. retail PC software market in 2007 can be attributed to Microsoft Office. The ratio of Office dollar growth to total PC software growth is 67 percent." The Year of Office 2007

The geek tends to quote the max price for the retail box that he can find - and it can be useful to insert a correction.

Office Home & Student is about $100 at Amazon.com, with a three seat license.

The price of four ink jet cartridges - and if you can't afford the consumables, you can't afford the office suite, at any price.

The direct sale academic price for Office Ultimate is $60. The Ultimate Steal If your employer has a volume licensing agreement with Microsoft, Office for home use is the price of the media plus S&H. Home Use Program

Re:"Almost Identical"?

[CSMatt]

I never said anything about how Microsoft Office 2007 was doing. I was only speculating that a significant amount of new OpenOffice.org users switched to OpenOffice.org because of Microsoft's UI overhaul.

I haven't got it yet, not in repository yet.

[apathy maybe]

OpenOffice.org 3 sounds like it's going to be great. And I'll start using it as soon as it shows up in the Ubuntu repository and I get prompted to update. Until then, I guess I won't. I guess that a lot of other people are having similar thoughts. (Not to mention, consider the number of MS Windows users compared to all non-MS Windows users, of course the majority of downloads are going to be for MS Windows.)

As for price, price is not a factor in me not using MS Windows (I just don't like it compared to GNOME, etc.). However, given the choice between MS Office and OpenOffice.org, it is.

However, it isn't the only thing, I just prefer OOo. I've been using it for a good number of years (and the only thing that used to piss me off was not being able to word count selections, they fixed that), and I've gotten used to the little quirks.

It also does things simply better! Take creating a business card, MS Word doesn't even come with a template for that job! (Not that OOo makes it easy... Why no bottom and right margin setting?)

Re:I haven't got it yet, not in repository yet.

[CSMatt]

You'll be waiting a while. Ubuntu won't have OO.o 3 until next April.

Long story short: upstream delays made it miss the Intrepid feature freeze.

Re:I haven't got it yet, not in repository yet.

[FilterMapReduce]

But it will (presumably) be added to the repository much sooner, right? It just won't be included on any Ubuntu discs until next April's release.

Re:I haven't got it yet, not in repository yet.

[east coast]

It also does things simply better! Take creating a business card, MS Word doesn't even come with a template for that job!

Wrong. The templates (yes, more than one is provided) is under Tool -> Letters and Mailings -> Envelops and Labels.

Granted, it's a pain to find it there but they've lumped all the Avery (and other large pre-formatted paper providers) templates in one area.

Re:I haven't got it yet, not in repository yet.

[Knuckles]

It will probably be available in the backports repo for 8.04 and 8.10. And there is a semi-official ppa repo for 8.10 now (google for it).

Almost identical?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been scorched before on slashdot for praising MSOffice, but again I beg to disagree that this is a "choice between almost identical software".
The functionality, features and ease of use of MSOffice (as compared to Open Office) still make it far superior.
Particularly, the new interface of MSOffice makes it much easier and intuitive to use (for most users) compared to any other office automation software.

Re:Almost identical?

[CSMatt]

Unless you are a veteran user of the 97-2003 line who used the suite for basic stuff. Then OpenOffice.org looks far more attractive.

Re:Almost identical?

[ciggieposeur]

Particularly, the new interface of MSOffice makes it much easier and intuitive to use (for most users) compared to any other office automation software.

If by "most users" you mean:

* People who have never used MSOffice sometime in the last 14 years.
* Excel power-users who have never used the chart wizard.
* Mac users who have never needed to interoperate with Windows MSOffice users who have VBA macros in their documents/spreadsheets.
* People who have never gotten used to applications that use menus to organize major features.

For everyone else, the new MSOffice is very intuitive.

Re:Almost identical?

[Forbman]

Sorry, hard to include Office 2007 in that line...

--another pissed off Office 2007 have-to-user at work.

Just as an aside...how fast to do paste special in Excel 2007? Hmm... not so easy to find in the new "easy to use" interface...

Re:Almost identical?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Unless you are a veteran user of the 97-2003 line who used the suite for basic stuff.

I am.

Then OpenOffice.org looks far more attractive.

It doesn't.

Obviously your and other peoples' mileage does vary.

Re:Almost identical?

[Ritz_Just_Ritz]

Exactly. I have used Word and Excel for ~15 years. I'm not what I'd consider a "power user," but I've grown comfortable with the UI and basic features over this time. Since approximately version 2.0 or 2.1, I haven't felt the need to use the real Word or Excel even once. The Oo equivalents have been able to replicate the functionality of Word/Excel without fail to the point that I don't even bother installing Office anymore. I have also switched over various family members and a few small businesses (sub-50 employees) with nary a complain about missing functionality.

I'm sure there are folks out there that can point to some obscure features of M$ Office products that they rely on, but I think the vast majority of us fit into the mold of users that just use the basic features. I can't imagine needing or wanting to spring for another M$ Office license again.

Cheers,

Re:Almost identical?

[heffrey]

Paste special?! It's on the Home page, in the left most section which is titled Paste. You just click the drop down and there it is.

So you just open the program and there's this big button called "Paste". How hard can it possibly be to find it.

Actually I find Office 2003 rather tricky to use now that I've used 2007. It took me around an afternoon to get used to the new interface and I would not want to go back.

Re:Almost identical?

[ciggieposeur]

So you just made the case to keep using Windows too.

No, I made the case to keep using OpenOffice.org. The application's interface has far greater impact on the user experience than the underlying operating system. Operating systems have the same general WIMP interface now, and most Linux distros work much closer like Windows than not out of the box.

Is it different? Yes. But so is OpenOffice. All the icons are different in Open Office from Office 2003. All of the menus are different. So I guess nobody should swtich to Oo3 either lest they get lost and confused.

The difference from Office 2003 to Office 2007 isn't just some icons with a new theme. It's "no way to get the menus back (even though 2003 menu keystrokes still work)", "no chart wizard in Excel (so scatterplots are completely wrong every. single. time. you hit the chart icon)", and "no VBA in Office 2008 for Mac". These are deal breakers if you actually used Office 97-2003 for more than the occasional letter or trivial spreadsheet.

I don't want New For The Sake Of New, I want New Because It's Seriously Better, and I'm not seeing much Seriously Better in the ribbon. OOo isn't the best possible interface, but it's decent enough and gets the job done without too much fuss and that lets me focus on the Real Work I'm using it for.

Change happens. Stop being a troglodyte and bitching about it being different.

And a "fuck you" right back.

Re:Almost identical?

[rantingkitten]

All I ever heard from Windows users, particularly at work, is how they couldn't figure out how to do anything through the "ribbon" or whatever they're calling it these days. Even though OO's menu isn't exactly like Office's, the fact that it has a menu makes it more attractive to people, I think; since every other application they've used in the past ten years has a menu, they know they can find what they're looking for there. The "ribbon" confounds even a veteran like me, though I admit I've only used it a handful of times because I use OO exclusively on all my machines.

What "functionality and features" are you referring to that MS Office has and OO doesn't? The majority of users just want to write a letter, pretty it up a bit, and send it off. Or make a spreadsheet, add some columns, multiply some others, and be done with it. OO handles all of this and anything else Joe User would ever want to do, as far as I can tell. If you've got counterexamples let's hear 'em, but my guess is you're going to have to dig pretty deep for some obscure stuff that hardly anyone ever needs or wants.

And, as mentioned above, "ease of use" is pretty subjective. I find Office 2007 to be a horrendous UI disaster, and have heard others voice the same opinion. Other people like it fine, or -- as is usually the case -- just don't care one way or the other.

As far as users are concerned it IS almost identical software -- it lets them make spreadhseets, type up reports, and make their stupid presentations no one will remember after the meeting is over. 99% of the rest of the "features" are just bloat added in, occasionally used by a few people from time to time, and ignored by everyone else. And odds are OO does most of those "features" just fine.

Good News

[phmadore]

I've been using it since the .sxw days, and used StarOffice way back when they first released it for free. I find this news heartening given the recent announcements about OSS's supposed impending doom. Give it time; I bet by 4.0, OOo will be as popular as Firefox.

OpenOffice.org vs Office 2007

[ciggieposeur]

I think a lot of people might be looking at OOo because it is the only still-supported Office workalike that works mostly like MSOffice 97/XP/2003. For those of us forced to use MSOffice 2007 it's a no-brainer. Plus OOo can be installed alongside MSOffice 2007 with no problems.

Re:OpenOffice.org vs Office 2007

[level_headed_midwest]

That is one big advantage. Being able to export to PDF without spending a buttload of money on Adobe Acrobat or spending a lot of time to find a good Windows freeware print-to-PDF program is another advantage of OOo, and OOo 3.0 can also open and edit PDFs to some degree with the Sun PDF plugin, which is a huge feature. One last thing I have heard quite a few others praise is the ability to open almost any document file type out there right out of the box, now that OOo 3.0 has Office 2007 XML support.

Re:OpenOffice.org vs Office 2007

[hyfe]

Save as PDF or XPS from microsoft. Works like a charm. I have no idea why they didn't include it as standard.

Re:OpenOffice.org vs Office 2007

[cbhacking]

For the record, Microsoft has a free, supported, and well-integrated PDF exporter for Office 2007. It actually used to be part of the base install, but Adobe threw a fit so MS made it an optional download (with a link in the base install that says something like "Download a tool to safe in Adobe PDF format..."

Download link (first hit on Office 2007 PDF): http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en

I use it all the time, since I get free printing on the department's Linux computers and don't trust OO.o not to screw up the formatting on my papers/resumes/whatever.

From the article

[bonch]

While you would think OpenOffice would be most popular among Linux users, the demand for Windows users came as a surprise to many people. The numbers are skewed however, because many Linux users receive their updates from Linux distributors rather than the website. Still, it shows that Microsoft's Office software is slowly loosing its market dominance now that there are suitable alternatives available.

Most Linux users get their software from their distro, so that's the reason for the predominance of Windows in the downloads. However, the conclusion reached by the author is arbitrary. There is nothing here showing that Office is "loosing" market dominance. All you have are OpenOffice download numbers, which don't prove anything about market dominance. Office isn't even available for Linux, so how is its market dominance changing from what it was before?

Re:From the article

[lwsimon]

Agree. I use OOo all the time at home, but before that, I used Wordpad or Kwrite. These days, I'm seriously considering switching to Google Docs anyhow, as I'm usually on the road.

Mac downloads already outnumber linux almost 3:2

[RalphBNumbers]

That was quick (especially considering they only support intel based macs).
Maybe in the future OSS products looking for market share will support official native Mac versions sooner, instead of leaving us with either X11 interfaces or third party ports.

ahh

[nomadic]

As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor.

And that's why more people use OpenOffice than Microsoft Office...oh wait

Probably because of java

[ArchieBunker]

When downloading or updating java from Sun the default is to also install OO. Highly annoying if you ask me.

Re:Probably because of java

[bjourne]

What are you talking about? I have downloaded JDK:s and JRE:s from java.sun.com probably hundreds of times and never been prompted to install OO too. Is this a new feature or something?

Re:Probably because of java

[macbuzz01]

About as bad as Safari / Quicktime & iTunes, except that it doesn't technically install OO, it just downloads the installer... On the otherhand, it does get the word out about OO.

Awesome website

[Sentry21]

I'm not a huge fan of OpenOffice (which I refuse to call 'OpenOffice.org, because it's an office suite, not a webserver), but I'll say one thing - their main page is exactly right.

Go to www.openoffice.org and take a look. What do you see? A list of things to do, in big text, impossible to miss. I wanted to download. Normally I hunt for a link. Now, it takes me 5 seconds to grab what I want.

No wonder they got so many downloads - they didn't hide them three pages deep.

BitTorrent?

[FilterMapReduce]

I would also ask how they accounted for BitTorrent downloads, which are provided on the main OpenOffice.org website (in addition to the normal third-party sites). At first glance, it seems like the most logical interpretation is to count each copy of the .torrent file downloaded from the main website as one full download of the corresponding file. Or are they only counting downloads of the software from their own site?

Re:BitTorrent?

[prod-you]

The tracker can count how many people have finished downloading it.

They aren't the same

[wicka]

Unfortunately OpenOffice and Word are not identical pieces of software. Not by a long shot.

Re:Free vs "free".

[GCsoftware]

Um maybe you need to read more carefully but the link in the GGP is actually to a scam site (piratebay.com), not the legitimate Pirate bay (thepiratebay.com)

PPC-based Mac users have to wait too

[Shin-LaC]

For some reason, OO.o isn't providing a PowerPC build of OpenOffice 3.0 in English. You can get 3.0 in French or Japanese, but the latest English build is 2.4. During development of 3.0, PPC builds have been provided by a third party, but they seem to have stopped at 3.0rc4. I wonder why.

Almost identical? Not quite.

[mollymoo]

I've been looking for a job over the past couple of months (I've now found one, thanks for asking). I used OO to write my CV (resume) and saved it as a .doc. I wasn't getting anything like the response rate I usually get from applications and really couldn't understand why. Until, that is, I loaded up my CV in Word and discovered the formatting was fucked - my CV looked like shit. I never bothered to work out exactly what happened, but it seems some small difference in font rendering or spacing meant half the dates wrapped onto the next line, so the whole thing looked a mess. I gave up on OO, switched to Word and heard back from the very next job I applied for. Perhaps I screwed up, perhaps there are some compatibility options I should have used, but the fact of the matter is I used OO, selected "save as .doc" and didn't get what I expect. That cost me a good few weeks work and as a result a few thousand pounds.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[aurelianito]

You should have sent a PDF instead and avoid all the problems.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[bigbird]

It is a common requirement in the UK for submitting your CV to recruitment agencies.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, sending out a resume in an editable format is just unprofessional for anything higher than a receptionist position.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[mollymoo]

After the second person who didn't have clue what a PDF is (I shit you not), I gave up on them. For direct applications to tech companies PDFs are ideal, but recruitment agents are a) stupid and b) prefer Word files, so they can edit out your contact details to ensure they don't get bypassed.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[mollymoo]

Oh I'd love to, with something with spikes on it. They just match up keywords in return for 10% of your starting salary. If they're looking for MS-SQL and you've only put down SQL Server experience you're not qualified. If you've got 10 years experience and know Perl and Python you're a worse candidate for a Ruby job than some guy fresh out of college who once wrote a 100 line Ruby script. Because, you know, he knows Ruby and you don't.

I only ever hear bad things about recruitment agents. I really don't know why more companies don't advertise directly. It can't be that much hassle to take a few phone calls and read a few emails.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[The Cisco Kid]

Why on earth would you send someone an electronic copy of your resume in a *any* editable word processor format? Especially when different wrd processors, or even different versions of the same word processor will render the same document in completely different ways.

PDF would be the way to go, regardless of the tool you originally use to enter it.

I assume you don't work in the systems administration field, or IT security. If you do I feel sorry for whatever company hired you (both due to the idiocy in accepting such a format, and because they've hired someone incompetent enough to send it that way in the first place)

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[jopsen]

Then hopefully he leaves he phone number after his name... So that you can call him at yell at him about vendor lockin, undefined specs, freedom and how incompetent you'd look if you used Word!

Once he hangup, you can go hungry to bed :) But at the very least you can sleep well, knowing that you stood up for what's right and did not accept an oppressing monopoly.

Then next morning you can start rewriting your CV in LaTeX, print it out on real physical paper an actually get a job...

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[pseudonomous]

Turns out the "Portable Document Format" isn't so portable after all...

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[Antique Geekmeister]

Because recruiters, and HR personnel, ask for it that way. They use it to add their own notes on a candidate, to feed it to forms processors, to put it on their own corporate letterhead, and if they're sneaky, to check the document history and see what you've edited. (I've done that to Word documents I've received: it's enlightening.)

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[Bert64]

The page margins *should* be saved in the document... If you change your page margin, save, and reopen in another version of openoffice it will work just fine... Openoffice uses the margins you or the document specifies, but word uses whatever paper margins are set by your printer...
Send a file to someone with a different default printer and you have problems.
Incidentally, how many word documents have you seen where people put tables and other detritus way outside of the margins anyway? OO shows the margins by default, word does not which leads to this shoddy unprofessional behaviour.

Also the fonts depend on what's installed on your system, and should be saved in the document... If the target system doesn't have the same font you used then it will try to substitute it for one it thinks is similar, which can often break things.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite.

[slamb]

I loaded up my CV in Word and discovered the formatting was fucked - my CV looked like shit. I never bothered to work out exactly what happened, but it seems some small difference in font rendering or spacing meant half the dates wrapped onto the next line, so the whole thing looked a mess. I gave up on OO, switched to Word and heard back from the very next job I applied for. Perhaps I screwed up, perhaps there are some compatibility options I should have used, but the fact of the matter is I used OO, selected "save as .doc" and didn't get what I expect.

It seems likely that you're guilty of a pet peeve of mine: brittle formatting. If so (the rest of my post assumes this), it's not an OpenOffice problem. It often happens when moving documents from one machine with Microsoft Word to another (different version, different OS, different fonts installed). You almost certainly have this problem even within the same editing session on the same machine when you make the tiniest change to your document, whether it's to formatting or content.

The solution is to use the tool properly. For example,

• rather than hitting space a bunch of times until the date looks right-aligned, ask the word processor to right-align it. (If you have something on the left of the same line, you can use a right tab stop or a table to make both work properly.)
• rather than hitting enter a bunch of times until you get a page break in the desired place, insert an explicit page break.
• rather than hitting enter at the end of a bibliography line and manually intending the next line, telling the word processor that the first line should not be intended but subsequent lines should be.
• rather than putting something at the top or bottom of each page by hand, use the headers and footers features.
• rather than typing "see page 3", use a reference to autogenerate the page number of your target.

Any time you find yourself hitting the same key many times or correcting many like things after making changes to your text or formatting, you're doing it wrong. Learning to do it right will result in a much more pleasant and successful experience.

This requires an attitude change. Many people refuse to learn how to make documents properly; some because they're "not computer people"; some because they're geeks who don't like GUIs or writing in human languages. I find both attitudes disgusting. The "not computer people" spend all day every day in front of one, and the latter group do need to communicate with people and could easily learn the GUI or find an alternative (e.g. TeX). If efficient or quality is important, you need to take some pride in your work and learn. It's a poor workman who blames his tools.

Re:Does this beat Firefox's record

[Firewing1]

Nope - Firefox had roughly 8 million downloads in a single day, versus the 3 million OO.o 3.0 downloads in the first week.

Why highlight the lack of MS2007 export?

[CSMatt]

Not sure why the article sees the need to mention this:

OpenOffice.org 3.0 eases some adoption concerns. It is able to open all Office-formatted files, including the latest Office Open XML (OOXML) documents (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.), but it cannot save OOXML files natively.

Why would you need to save in this format? The existing binary support should be all you need if you need to collaborate with Microsoft Office users. It's their saving in Microsoft Office 2007 format that causes the roadblocks, not OpenOffice.org's lack of exporting to it.

Apathy trumps price for most users

[celest]

when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor.

Actually, I'm currently doing my Master's thesis on this exact topic, namely the switching barriers between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org. I'll post a summary of the full empirically assessed results to Slashdot when the study is complete. Currently, however, it looks like that Apathy is a much stronger factor than price. In fact, the author of the article hints at this:

In the past, it's always been included on my computers which is fine

Another important factor which I have hypothesized (and the literature suggests is accurate) trumps price is user inconvenience. Most users will pay to avoid hassle of any sorts. Further, most users will pay to avoid PERCEIVED inconvenience, even if, in reality, there would be no inconvenience. The FEAR of inconvenience is enough to make them continue to pay.

If you would like more details about my empirical research on this subject, feel free to contact me. A paper on the subject will be published by the Open Source Business Resource in the spring.

Re:Apathy trumps price for most users

[celest]

Sounds like a more formalised version of this comment:

http://linux.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=219158&cid=17788090 [slashdot.org]

Somewhat, but with more of a focus on the consumer marketing approach. Think customer preference between Pepsi and Coke. Less technical focus. Less objective.

This approach recognizes that often the decisions of consumers are not based on logic, or on the best features, performance, price, etc. There are other factors that matter to them, that they rationalize in their heads that have a real world impact. I'm trying to quantify these factors for this specific case. The results should be the best estimation of real-world barriers between the two. Most current assessments simply compare the technical features, which, while useful for some classes of users, doesn't speak to a larger class of users who are more affected by other factors.

Re:Apathy trumps price for most users

[celest]

It's one part of the degree program, yes.

And if you're suggesting it's easy, bear in mind my current draft is pushing 150 pages. This is a properly controlled empirical study, vetted by the university's ethics committee. There's nothing pedestrian about it.

If you're curious, you can read more about the program at the program's webpage.

Re:Apathy trumps price for most users

[AaronLawrence]

This sounds very interesting. One empirical study showing data and conclusions is worth millions of fanatical rants on Slashdot (or in company meetings). I think we in IT feel there are some odd reasons why users won't change, but can't articulate them or say how important they are.

The other post about MS Office being a standard part of the budget is a very interesting thought - obvious now I see it written down, but I didn't think of it before.

We are the hardcore

[coryking]

Google is nothing but a couple little improvements to Archie and Veronica. Typical of marketing losers, they take a working search engine like Veronica, "embrace and extend" GOPHER to use HTTP, and then plaster it with useless ads and graphics.

I have my copy of Lynx complied with HTTP off. Screw those corporate bastards!

Meh.

[walterbyrd]

If you are a dedicated ms-office user, and you really need 100% of the functionality of ms-office; then get ms-office - don't even think about anything else.

But, if you are like most of the population, and you just need a good office product, that is basically compatible with standard file formats, then openoffice does the trick.

JMHO.

#downloads != #users

[freddy_dreddy]

This bogus statistic keeps resurfacing. Having x downloads doesn't mean you have x users.

The statistic I'm interested in is the percentage of people that downloaded it and then later updated - that's a much better representation of satisfied customers. The time between update release and downloaded update by a user is correlated to how much that user relies on the software package, especially so for OSS which is typically low in pre-release testing on different boxes compared to commercial software.

Insensitive clods

[Charles Dodgeson]

I'm an English speaking PPC OS X user, you insensitive clod. I finally gave up waiting and grabbed the Spanish language version. But there still in no English version for OS X on the PowerPC.

Excel vs OO.o

[sjbe]

Exactly. I have used Word and Excel for ~15 years. I'm not what I'd consider a "power user," but I've grown comfortable with the UI and basic features over this time. Since approximately version 2.0 or 2.1, I haven't felt the need to use the real Word or Excel even once.

Just for comparisons sake, I am a heavy use of Excel (a "power user" if you will) and while I would switch to use OO.o in a heartbeat I simply cannot yet. Why? Two reasons fundamentally. The first is that Excel has a HUGE installed base in the finance world and that isn't going away any time soon. Want to work in finance? Better learn Excel - substitutes need not apply. I don't like it but that's the way it is. Excel is a de-facto monopoly in financial analytics. (disclosure: I'm a certified accountant as well as an engineer)

Second reason is that there are some things that Excel (as of OO.o 2.4) simply does better. (I'm just now checking out 3.0) Pivot tables, charting, and a lot of statistical tools have been better in Excel so far. I genuinely hope that changes. Excel has PLENTY of flaws but it's simply had more development time. Not to say you can't get excellent quality work done in OO.o but as someone who uses pretty much every feature Excel has I can say with authority Excel is the better tool overall - so far. If your needs are rather basic, OO.o is terrific but for many advanced users so far there simply hasn't been a choice.

Re:Excel vs OO.o

[Creepy Crawler]

And why would the financial world trust Excel at anything statistical?

One would use a real stat suite, lest you implement the formulas (or MS) wrong.

There was recently an article stating that Excel stat isnt very accurate. It was rounding errors 10^-2 or -3, which could easily compound if used excessively.

Re:Excel vs OO.o

[jimicus]

And why would the financial world trust Excel at anything statistical?

One would use a real stat suite, lest you implement the formulas (or MS) wrong.

There was recently an article stating that Excel stat isnt very accurate. It was rounding errors 10^-2 or -3, which could easily compound if used excessively.

They shouldn't, and IME if you speak to any experienced accountant who fully understands the limitations of the tools they're working with, they won't.

However, there are plenty of business people who don't fully understand the limitations of the tools they're working with. They just see Excel (and, for that matter, Access) as a quick, easy way to solve a relatively straightforward problem without having to go through all the hassle of finding an appropriate specialist tool and going through the necessary hoops to get up and running with it.

Fast-forward two or three years and this Excel spreadsheet is basically doing the numbers for an entire department, it's become absurdly complicated and nobody really understands it. Articles like this one from The Register prove that pretty neatly.

Record Schmecord, it's just good stuff!

[nickull]

I work for Adobe on the ODF Technical Committee. ODF made some great decisions that make the format much more admirable over others (use of RelaxNG Schema, open formats wherever possible etc.). I am happy about the growing use of OO. Jon Bosak also has posted some great thoughts on this. Jon's thoughts on ODF, OOXML and PDF.

Re:Because it breaks the MS Office grip

[Ethanol-fueled]

Microsoft may have shot themselves in the foot with their "ribbon" idea. The similarities(read: less of a learning curve) between OO and older versions of Office become more apparent.

Spam sites already

[matt me]

Check out the number of spam sites already, google for openoffice (http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=openoffice), and you get sponsored links like these -

# OpenOffice.org 3 www.office-soft.net Get the Free OpenOffice Download the latest Version |
# OpenOffice 2008 - Free OpenOffice.org-Suite.com OpenOffice Latest Version. Fast & Easy - 100% Guaranteed.

This one is quite nasty http://www.office-soft.net/uk/
Click the link "You must accept the terms and conditions to download any program"

PRELIMINARY WARNING:
THE COST OF EACH SMS FROM THE USER'S MOBILE PHONE IS 1.5 POUNDS (VAT INCLUDED). UNLESS OTHERWISE SPECIFIED, THE DOWNLOAD COST SHALL BE FOUR SMS.
Please read these USAGE CONDITIONS carefully and, if appropriate, use the download service which shall imply the express and complete acceptance of each and every one of these USAGE CONDITIONS. Otherwise, please close this website.

ONE. PREMIUM SERVICE DESCRIPTION

1.1. Through this website (hereinafter the Website), users can download executables that contain the selected computer program from our servers to their hard drive (the SOFTWARE).

1.2. Netlink Network Corp. offers a PREMIUM high speed download service that is efficient and virus free. In exchange, the user shall first send three SMS under the conditions specified in clause 2.2 that defines the commercial conditions of the service.

TWO. USE OF THE PREMIUM SERVICE

2.1. In order to access the PREMIUM service, the user shall first send three SMS to 88889 as per the detailed instructions provided at all times in the download section of the Website.

2.2. The cost of each SMS sent by the user to said number is 1.50 pounds + VAT; therefore the total cost of access to the PREMIUM service shall be 3.60 Euros + VAT.

2.3. After sending the three SMS, and always in accordance with the detailed instructions provided in the download section, the user shall receive a code that will enable him to perform the high speed download through the PREMIUM service.

etc. The others are similar scams, they want you to give your email address, sent them money by credit card, or by SMS, and have bogus stamps of officialdom and verisign secured etc.

Of course, when the scammers want in, it means the project is a success.

There can be major differences between them.

[pstorry]

Some differences between Word and WordPerfect:

1. Word handles word count differently to WordPerfect. WordPerfect counts all words, even those in footnotes. Word didn't for a long time (I think they might have fixed that now).
Word was unwelcome as a format in many legal courts in the US, because some types of filing have word count limits and users or Word consistently over-ran, thus filing documents that the court could not accept.

2. Word has a paragraph-based formatting engine, which is very different to the stream based one in WordPerfect. That's a huge difference - it's like saying that Word is a bitmap painting package, and WordPerfect is a vector one.

Those are two differences off the top of my head. I'd say that switching from WordPerfect to Word could well require training, especially if these kinds of differences were ones you used a lot in your work.

Here's one practical example I found many years ago:
Word has no concept of right-justification within a line unless you use tabs. WordPerfect does. If you right-justify in WordPerfect and then change your margins, paper size or paper orientation then WordPerfect just handles it for you - the text snaps to the new margin with no effort required on your part.
When I had to use Word, I had to learn the tab-based workaround. And I had to change the formatting of some kinds of documents I produced, as switching from portrait to landscape meant much more extra work as I then had to change all the tab stops on those pages too.
(I eventually solved this by creating styles with the tab stops in them, one for each page orientation. But that solution took time to arrive at.)

Whether your word processor is Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice.org's Writer, AbiWord, or something else - any heavy use will likely expose you to some feature that either has no direct analogue in other products, or that works differently in them.

If all you ever do is write one-page letters with no real formatting beyond basic text appearance, right-justifying paragraphs and indenting text, then what I've written means nothing to you. You're in the 80% of people who use only 20% of the features. (Possibly even 90%/10% these days.)

For the other 20%, switching word processors will always mean retraining to some degree, as they find these differences by trail and error.

Personally, I love MS Office...

[Giometrix]

... but not enough to pay $500 for it. I like it better than OOo, but not THAT much better.

I switched to Linux because of OO & FF

[jvin248]

I made the switch to Linux (including Kubuntu, Xubuntu, DSL, Kanotix, Knoppix) due to the high quality alternatives provided by Open Office, Firefox, and Thunderbird.

I know a lot of people that switched to OO just to get the pdf output format. Sun continues to do an amazing job with the open source community on OO.

Re:Almost identical? Not quite. (MOD PARENT UP)

[kklein]

People are going to flame you and call you stupid, so let me just head off some of their inevitable criticisms:

You should have checked!

No, you shouldn't have had to have checked. Besides, this assumes that you still have to have MS Office and OO.o, and isn't the whole point of this bru-ha-ha to say that you don't need MS Office if you have the free and wonderful OO.o? No, Word did not screw up your CV. OO.o does not export to Word correctly. It's OO.o's responsibility to properly support the de facto industry standard.

You should have sent a PDF!

Okay, smart guys, you try sending PDFs instead of Word documents. There are still lots of moronic HR departments (well, are there any other kind?) who don't even know what they are. The first time I started sending those, I got a call back from an angry HR person saying "We don't take scanned CVs!" I was honestly confused. "I'm sorry, but that is just a PDF of my CV. It's not scanned." "We have to be able to search the text. Please send us the original Word document."

Well you know, and I know that you can very well search the text of a PDF, but that isn't the point; the point is whether HR knows, and, as I think I've already established, those people are borderline retarded.

Also, a lot of places actually request .docs. If OO.o can't produce them correctly, then you look like an idiot. In my case in the above story, where I was requested to send a .doc? It meant I had to get ahold of MS Office, because I'd been using (and liking) OO.o for a year. Hell, the next problem I had was that I had my "letterhead" in my header in Word, and an HR guy called me complaining that I'd used a "gray font," and that it was no wonder I didn't have a job if I didn't know how to format a Word document correctly. "It's conventional to make your name and address legibile to the person looking at your CV," he said. So I went back and reformatted all of that stuff by hand, like an idiot who can't use software. In all of these cases, I did the right thing. In none of these cases was the company itself really to blame. They might have been nice places to work. But when you're applying for a job, you first have to get through the imbeciles in HR who stand guard at the gate. Anything that they don't understand--and that's a lot, it turns out--is going to get your CV tossed in the bin.

Why would you want to work somewhere that wants .docs and doesn't worship at the throne of OSS???

Because he needs a job so he can, you know, eat.

OO.o is damn nice for being free, and I really liked some of its features that are missing in Office. But, in all honestly, Office does more better and is the industry standard.

And finally, to all the people going on about having to pay for PDF export? Um, sourceforge up yourself some PDFcreator. It's free. I've been using it for years without issue.

Re:This is the record? WOW

[Whiteox]

No. Most Windows machines are bundled with MS Works. It's basically 'free' in Dell systems for example. But I won't be surprised if OO3 will be included in the future as nothing opens Works files without a plug-in.

Re:Something better than OOo

[beav007]

what-you-see-is-a-bit-like-what-you'll-get editor

That's better than the WYSIWTF that Frontpage managed...

Microsoft Works drives people to OpenOffice

[OutaControl]

Microsoft Works comes as a standard option on the lower end PC's. It's so stripped down that it is actually aggravating to use. It won't even open most existing XLS or DOC files properly!

Open Office was a breath of fresh air for those of us too cheap/unwilling to purchase the full MS Office 2007 (especially given it's lackluster reviews).

It works smoothly, has all of the interfaces we've come to learn and love, and opens/closes Microsoft Office files unlike Microsoft Works...

Of course Open Office sucks

[Repossessed]

I wouldn't be surprised of #3 captured the essential truth of the situation. OOo is one of the worst pieces of OSS I use. I've searched systematically for something better, and haven't found it. At this point, I feel like OOo was a dead end that had the unfortunate effect of killing off interest in competing OSS office software.

While I'm inclined to agree that OO is one of the worst pieces of software out there (open source or otherwise), office suites tend to suck period, OO's crapiness reflects that it is in fact trying to duplicate something which needs to be rebuilt from concept up, or perhaps done away with entirely, except the user base is too firmly entrenched into ideas about what productivity software should do.

Note that I don't lay this blame on Microsoft (which is strange...) the business world expects a lot of things that are either misplaced, or a waste of time. Database like functions from a spreadsheet, fancy document layout tools (not useless, but not really suitable for a program with the primary purpose of writing letters and memos), powerpoint (the whole thing). About the only thing in the entire office suite set that doesn't need a complete rework would be email clients, and even then I've had users complain that the email client doesn't render javascript...

Re:Of course Open Office sucks

[Pulzar]

Note that I don't lay this blame on Microsoft (which is strange...) the business world expects a lot of things that are either misplaced, or a waste of time. Database like functions from a spreadsheet, fancy document layout tools (not useless, but not really suitable for a program with the primary purpose of writing letters and memos), powerpoint (the whole thing).

Those are some pretty big attacks on popular office tools. A word processor is not used primarily to write letters and memos, documentation is most certainly one of its prime uses, and you need to be able to lay out your diagrams, tables, and images in such a way for people to understand what you're writing. Spreadsheets are an obvious way to represent database tables, so it allows users to create mini-databases without the hassle of an actual DB where creating one would provide no advantages. That's why "pseudo-database" functionality is almost more important than actual number crunching. Finally, the usefulness of a presentation tool is obvious to anyone who has worked in an office for more than a few months.

Do you have any suggestions on how to do things better to back up your claims that these things are a waste of time?

Thiotimoline?

[Mathinker]

If Asimov were still around to read your comment, he'd probably knock off a story as to how new versions of OO.o aren't actually developed the way we think; instead, they're reverse engineered from compiled binaries found on pre-release laptops!